RE: Inventing Email

Lets face it, email sucks as it is known today.  While valiant efforts are being made by Google to re-invent online communication, the fact remains that there is a large user base of desktop based email clients.  The problem with email is that it’s very top down, meaning that forces it’s self on you.  It’s not natural.  Emails get lost because of this.

Without flagging or staring emails to come back to later, vital information can be lost.  Virtually all businesses now use email as its major means of communication but the applications that deliver the information have not evolved in over 10 years.

After reading an article by Michael Leis about how email is killing you and your business, I decided to draft some ideas on how an email application could be re-invented.

Here are the results:

So emails slide in from the right side.  You would be able to choose how many emails you want to view at a time.  This wireframe shows three emails.  Each email offers the user the ability to “Reply”, “Forward”, “Save”, and “Remove” a conversation.  Once an email has been replied to or removed a new email will slide in.  If the screen is full of unanswered emails the user is prompt on the right hand side with a count of unanswered emails.  The view-port scrolls horizontally to reveal those emails.

Other views:

Here is a view that visually separates out unanswered emails and replied emails.  The unanswered emails will be supplied with a screenshot of the message and favicon of the person who sent it.

Conslusion

These designs are not perfect by any means.  There are still large problems that would need to be resolved like deletion of emails and relationships between conversations.  By bringing attention to unanswered emails users are naturally prompt to response as opposed to sifting through thousands of emails to find emails that you need to respond to.